Main menu

Caitlin Welsh Joins CSIS as Global Food Security Program Director

March 27, 2020

WASHINGTON, March 27, 2020: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is pleased to announce Caitlin Welsh as the new director of the Global Food Security Program. Ms. Welsh will lead CSIS’s research and analysis on U.S. leadership in global food security and agricultural development.

“Caitlin joins us at a critical juncture. Resource insecurity will be a major driver of conflict this century, and we need to get this issue right in order to build a safer and more prosperous world,” said John J. Hamre, CSIS president and CEO, and Langone Chair in American Leadership. “She has demonstrated remarkable policy insights and leadership during her time in government, and we are delighted that she will be leading our efforts in this area.”

She served from October 2018 through January 2020 in the National Security Council and National Economic Council as director of global economic engagement, where she coordinated U.S. policy in the G7 and G20 across multiple summits. Prior to the White House, Ms. Welsh spent over seven years in the Department of State’s Office of Global Food Security, including as acting director, offering guidance to the secretary of state on global food security and its relationship to urbanization, climate change, and conflict.

As a presidential management fellow, Ms. Welsh oversaw a portfolio of agriculture-related grants at the U.S. African Development Foundation. Ms. Welsh also lived and worked in Morocco’s breadbasket region as a Peace Corps volunteer, witnessing the complex causes and effects of food insecurity and working to improve lives through education. Ms. Welsh received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and M.P.A. from Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs. She hails from Erie, Pennsylvania and speaks Arabic and French.